PAM complements NHI governance, but the identity model is different

At a glance

What this is: This is an analysis of why privileged access management covers human admin access well but does not fully govern non-human identities such as service accounts and API keys.

Why it matters: IAM teams need a separate governance model for NHIs because their creation, ownership, lifecycle, and scale differ materially from human privileged access.

By the numbers:

• NHIs outnumber human identities by 25x to 50x in modern enterprises.
• Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them.
• Only 5.7% of organisations have full visibility into their service accounts.

👉 Read Oasis Security's analysis of why PAM does not fully manage non-human identities

Context

Privileged access management was built to govern human administrators who can be tied back to an authoritative source such as HR and Active Directory. Non-human identities do not fit that model cleanly. They are created in cloud platforms, Kubernetes, CI/CD systems, and application workflows, often without a single system of record or a consistent owner.

That difference matters because the identity perimeter has shifted. Service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates now carry privileged access across modern infrastructure, but the controls designed for human accounts cannot reliably see their lifecycle, their dependencies, or their actual business use. That leaves IAM teams with a coverage gap between human privileged access and machine access governance.

Key questions

Q: How should security teams govern service accounts that PAM does not fully cover?

A: They should treat service accounts as a separate identity class with explicit ownership, lifecycle states, and rotation rules. PAM may still help with human privileged access around those systems, but it will not by itself discover all machine identities, track their consumers, or offboard them cleanly when applications change.

Q: Why do non-human identities complicate privileged access management?

A: Because PAM was built around human identities tied to authoritative sources such as HR and Active Directory. Non-human identities are often created in cloud platforms and pipelines, may be shared across workloads, and can lack a single owner or standard lifecycle, which makes centralised privilege control incomplete.

Q: What breaks when service accounts have no clear owner or offboarding process?

A: Access outlives the workload that needed it, which turns a temporary integration credential into standing exposure. Teams lose the ability to answer who is responsible, when the identity should be retired, and whether the credential still serves a valid business purpose.

Q: Should organisations use PAM and NHI governance together?

A: Yes. PAM should continue to manage human privileged sessions, while NHI governance should handle machine identity discovery, ownership, rotation, and retirement. The two control sets overlap in the privileged domain but solve different identity problems, so using only one leaves blind spots.

Technical breakdown

Why PAM data models fit human privilege better than service accounts

PAM systems are strongest when the identity subject is a person with a defined role, a known sponsor, and a clear joiner-mover-leaver path. They can broker access, record sessions, and enforce approval workflows around that human account. Non-human identities are different. They may be embedded in code, shared across workloads, or created by developers directly in cloud-native platforms. That breaks the assumption that privileged access begins with a centrally managed identity record and ends with a clean offboarding event.

Practical implication: map which privileged accounts are human-controlled and which are machine-controlled before assuming PAM gives you full coverage.

Why NHI lifecycle and ownership are the real control problem

Non-human identities are not just privileged accounts without MFA. They have different lifecycle mechanics, often with no authoritative owner, no documented consumer, and no standard naming or format across platforms. A single service account can support a microservice, then spread into batch jobs, utilities, and automation flows. Once that relationship web is undocumented, governance becomes a guessing exercise. The core issue is not only access control. It is the absence of trustworthy identity context across creation, use, review, and retirement.

Practical implication: build ownership, lineage, and offboarding controls for NHIs before trying to fold them into human-style privileged access workflows.

How multi-cloud identity diversity undermines centralised privilege control

AWS service accounts, Azure service principals, GCP service accounts, and API keys do not behave like a single uniform identity class. Each platform exposes different semantics, lifecycle hooks, and audit data. PAM products designed around traditional infrastructure often struggle to understand those differences natively. That makes it harder to correlate identity with application dependency, data exposure, and entitlement scope. In practice, the control gap is not just visibility. It is the inability to translate machine identity diversity into a governance model that can be applied consistently at enterprise scale.

Practical implication: treat cloud-native machine identities as a distinct control domain and standardize governance around common metadata, not just access approval.

Breaches seen in the wild

• Cisco DevHub NHI breach — IntelBroker exploited exposed Cisco credentials, API tokens and keys in DevHub.
• BeyondTrust API key breach — compromised BeyondTrust API key led to unauthorized SaaS access.

Read our 52 NHI Breaches Analysis report for a comprehensive view of breaches impacting Non-Human Identities including AI Agents.

NHI Mgmt Group analysis

PAM was designed for privileged human accounts, not for the distributed identity fabric of cloud infrastructure. The model assumes an authoritative identity source, a single accountable user, and a well-structured provisioning workflow. NHIs break all three assumptions because they are created ad hoc in engineering workflows and often persist without a formal lifecycle owner. The implication is that PAM remains necessary, but it cannot be the universal control plane for privileged access.

Non-human identity governance is really a visibility and lineage problem before it is an access problem. If teams cannot reliably answer who owns a service account, what consumes it, and when it should be retired, then access policy alone cannot secure it. This is where lifecycle governance, not just credential vaulting, becomes the differentiator for enterprise IAM programmes. Practitioners should treat context loss as the primary failure mode.

Multi-cloud identity diversity creates a control translation problem that legacy PAM cannot solve cleanly. Cloud service accounts, principals, and keys expose different metadata and revocation paths, so the same privileged access rule does not map evenly across environments. That means governance teams need a machine-identity operating model that normalises context across platforms. The practitioner conclusion is straightforward: standardise around NHI metadata and lifecycle states, not around a single legacy privilege workflow.

Identity perimeter expansion is forcing IAM teams to separate access control from identity subject type. A human admin account can be session-brokered and audited through PAM, but a service account or API key often lives inside build, runtime, and integration paths. That makes the governance boundary much wider than privilege escalation. The implication for the field is that NHI management is becoming a core IAM capability, not an add-on feature of PAM.

NHI lifecycle debt is the hidden exposure created when privileged machine identities outlive their intended use. The same access that helps production systems run also becomes a standing risk when ownership, offboarding, and rotation are weak. The most durable fix is not more human-centric approval workflow, but explicit machine-identity governance that can keep pace with deployment velocity. Practitioners should expect lifecycle discipline to matter as much as least privilege.

From our research:

• Only 20% have formal processes for offboarding and revoking API keys, and even fewer have procedures for rotating them, according to the Ultimate Guide to NHIs.
• 91.6% of secrets remain valid five days after the targeted organisation is notified, showing a critical gap in remediation procedures.
• If you are building the lifecycle layer beneath PAM, start with NHI Lifecycle Management Guide for provisioning, rotation, and offboarding structure.

What this signals

NHI lifecycle debt is becoming the control gap that determines whether PAM remains useful at all. When machine identities are created faster than they are owned and retired, privileged access tooling can only see a slice of the problem. Practitioners should expect governance pressure to shift from approval workflows toward identity inventory quality and retirement discipline.

The practical signal for IAM teams is that PAM metrics alone are no longer sufficient. If you cannot measure how many service accounts are tracked, who owns them, and how many are offboarded on time, your privileged access posture is incomplete. That is why machine identity visibility has to become a standing governance metric, not a quarterly cleanup task.

As this boundary expands, programmes that already rely on the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 should map NHI discovery and lifecycle controls into Identify, Protect, and Detect. The category is moving toward machine identity governance as a standard component of identity security architecture.

For practitioners

• Separate human and machine privileged access inventories Classify administrator accounts, service accounts, API keys, tokens, and certificates into different governance tracks. Do not assume PAM session control means you have lifecycle control for machine identities.
• Map ownership and consumer relationships for every NHI Record the application, workload, or pipeline that uses each identity, plus the business owner and technical custodian. Without that lineage, offboarding and recertification remain partial at best.
• Standardise lifecycle states for machine identities Define creation, active use, rotation, suspension, and retirement as explicit states for service accounts and secrets. Tie those states to change management so credentials do not persist after the workload changes.
• Use PAM where it fits, then extend with NHI governance Keep PAM for human privileged sessions and pair it with controls that discover, classify, and retire non-human identities across cloud and development systems.

Key takeaways

• PAM remains valuable for human privileged access, but it does not fully govern the machine identities that now carry much of the enterprise attack surface.
• The key failure is not only access control. It is the lack of ownership, lineage, and lifecycle discipline for service accounts and other NHIs.
• IAM teams should pair PAM with dedicated NHI governance so discovery, rotation, and offboarding are controlled as a distinct operating model.

Key terms

• Non-Human Identity: A non-human identity is any machine-mediated credential or account used by software rather than a person. It includes service accounts, API keys, tokens, certificates, and workload identities. In governance terms, the challenge is that these identities can be created, used, and forgotten far faster than human accounts.
• Privileged Access Management: Privileged access management is the control discipline for brokering, monitoring, and auditing elevated access. It is strongest when identities are human, accountable, and centrally governed. For machine identities, PAM covers only part of the problem because lifecycle ownership, rotation, and retirement often sit outside its model.
• Identity Lineage: Identity lineage is the relationship chain between an identity, the workload or user that owns it, and the resources it can access. It matters because a credential without lineage cannot be governed cleanly. For NHIs, lineage is often the missing context that turns access into durable exposure.
• Lifecycle Governance: Lifecycle governance is the set of processes that track an identity from creation through active use, review, rotation, suspension, and retirement. It applies to humans and machines alike, but the signals and control points differ. For NHIs, lifecycle governance is the difference between temporary access and standing risk.

Deepen your knowledge

PAM and NHI governance are core topics in our NHI Foundation Level course, the industry's only accredited NHI security programme. If you are building a machine-identity governance layer alongside privileged access management, it is worth exploring.

This post draws on content published by Oasis Security: How does Non Human Identity complement Privileged Access Management for 360-degree security? Read the original.